Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir (34 page)

Mama Bear summoned one of the new lector candidates to the podium. He supplied a passage from the Letter of Paul to the Galatians: “Now the works of the flesh are obvious: immorality, impurity, lust, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of fury, acts of selfishness, dissensions, factions, occasions of envy, drinking bouts, orgies, and the like.”

Despondent, I checked off the fleshly sins one by one. Impurity? Yup. Fury? Check. Selfishness? Absolutely. This thoroughly depressing catalog made me want to go back to Dignity, put on a cardigan, and hear that I was 99 percent good.

“What do you hear?” Mama Bear asked.

My own spiritual doom. How the hell did I get myself into this mess?

“What do you hear?” Mama Bear asked again.

The lector candidates offered a hundred answers:

“Too fast.” “Too slow.” “Wrong emphasis.” “More feeling.” “Needs some liturgical dance.”

Mama Bear said, “What do you
hear?
Don’t tell me about technique.”

A quiet murmur passed through the group. A few tentative hands went up, and then fell. The candidates had become a class of preteens in a sex-ed class.

“What do you hear? What
messages
do you hear?”

For the first time, we focused on the meaning of the words we heard, the content, rather than just the delivery. This was unfamiliar territory. The Church has never encouraged its adherents to read the Bible.
The Lives of the Saints
was fine, but Lord knows the faithful couldn’t handle actual scripture. Even we lectors of many years standing didn’t consider the Word too closely.

“I hear a God who wants us to integrate the corporal works, the works of the body, with those of the spirit,” said Martina, a lector candidate I had recruited from the G-L Spirituality Group.

Mama Bear nodded approvingly. “Now that we have heard the message, we can proclaim it. One must be a good listener before one can ever be a good reader.”

“Listening?!” Scott exclaimed after I mentioned this revelation to him. “What a novel concept! You might want to try it someday.”

No sooner had the words left his mouth than I knew Scott had spoken my own private commandment direct from the Lord:
Sit down in that pew, quit your bitching, and listen, for My sale. With all that beseeching, horse trading, dealmaking, and yammering about Hale Marys, friars, wookies, fraudsters, and godchildren, you skipped the most basic prayer of all: listening
.

Divinely scolded into brokenness, I dragged my sorry, wounded ass over to the pew as directed. Sullen as a child, I asked God,
Listen to what, exactly?

Something inarticulate, something beautiful, something to love. Mikaela's crying, Father Myron’s sermon, an emphatic belch
—
anything
at all I've been saying it since day one: This is not about you
.

How about
, I proposed,
I go back to Dignity, what’s left of the Jesuit Urban Center, and all my gay spiritual forebears, and really pay attention this time, swear to You, cross my heart, hope to die? I'll find the good in them
.

And the Almighty said,
It’s about time you heard a gay voice besides your own
.

At the Feet of Flip Forcebears: A short History of Gap Catholics

In the beginning was a gay cardinal You heard me: the Brown Bag stands in the shoes of a big nancy queen. You may think this statement is merely wishful thinking, born of two sources:

1. my new easy-listening conversion experience, and

2. gay people’s tendency to lay claim to just about every person who forms America’s cultural inheritance: Michelangelo, Mychal Judge, Elton John, Rosie, Bert and Ernie, the Seven Dwarfs, Albus Dumbledore, and Shakespeare,

What actual evidence is there that William Cardinal O’Connell, who presided over the Boston archdiocese for the first half of the twentieth century, was a mo? Glad you asked. Consider the following facts:

• O’Connell wielded a jaunty gold-headed cane.
  

• He drove a Pierce-Arrow.
  

• He liked fine wine.
  

• His staff included a coachman, valet, and music master.
  

• His Renaissance palazzo had its own private golf course.
  

• He took fabulous vacations: O’Connell kept a winter home in the Bahamas and a summer home in an upscale beach resort, Marblehead, Massachusetts.
  

• O’Connell’s lifelong “traveling companion,” a bachelor, wrote years of letters to O’Connell, which were burned upon his death*
  

• He never went anywhere without his two black poodles.
  

My gaydar may be weak, but even I can connect these big pink dots. Short of catching him in flagrante delicto with a Broadway showboy, it was hard to garner more incontrovertible evidence. O’Connell makes Father Bear-Daddy look straighter than Captain Handsome.

Notwithstanding Cardinal O’Connell’s ascendancy, my gay Catholic forebears didn’t generally fare well before Vatican II. As one gay priest put it, “Look at the language of the Church fifty years ago. We were called pederasts and we belonged in the lower reaches of hell.”

A few reasons for hope presented themselves nonetheless:

• In the 1960s, the Church first distinguished between homosexual persons and homosexual activity and began loving the gay sinners (though still hating their sin that cried out to heaven for vengeance).
  

• In the 1970s, Boston’s Cardinal Gushing reportedly gave two priests permission to say Mass for the “exodus community,” an assembly of alienated Catholics including divorced people, those who had children out of wedlock, criminals, and homosexuals.
  

• Around the same time, this same audience started Inter-faith, Sunday-evening house masses in a Boston apartment.
  

A veteran of Interfaith described the services this way:

People sat around the coffee table on the floor…. It was a very intimate liturgy…. Maybe 50 percent of the time the homilies were dialogue homilies. The priest would throw out a topic, say some words on it, and then throw it open to anyone in the room who wanted to give personal comments on it. Sometimes that was very powerful, what they had gone through, things you didn’t know about them, what their experience with the Church had been. Quite often, there would be, you know, a lot of tears. It was very intense. At that point, I was living 45 miles outside the city, and I never missed it.

Many of the Interfaith regulars also had a hand in the early days of the Boston chapter of Dignity, founded in 1972 at a gay bar called the Randolph Country Club. Priests from many religious orders and a few active diocesan priests led Dignity’s weekly services, which for a period of time took place at Saint Clement’s, a Catholic church. A straight religious brother at Saint Clements took it upon himself to disseminate information about Dignity.

A Dignity veteran told me,

The people who were involved [in Dignity] felt the righteousness of the cause. There was no doubting, there was no groveling, no “Maybe we deserve this,” or “Maybe we’re OK.” Everything was a flat-out [affirmative] statement, and that’s how I felt, too…. I know people struggled for years, “Me oh my, oh poor me.” I never went through that…. I never felt that I was an awful person. The only thing I felt unfortunate about being gay was [that until Dignity] I didn’t have a place where I could share how I felt about myself and my relationship with God.

By the 1980s, weekly attendance at Dignity liturgies had reached 300 people, and once a month a Dignity member sponsored a more intimate Saturday home Mass of his or her own design. As another hopeful sign, the Church’s social service arm, Catholic Charities, adopted an employment nondiscrimination policy that covered gays long before Massachusetts ever passed such a law.

Marianne Duddy, now executive director of the national Dignity organization, told me, “You’ve got to remember, there was a real climate of fear back then.”

Knee-jerk skepticism filled my head.
Fear? Fear of what? Had the members of Dignity experienced a severe outbreak of static cling from all that hugging? Was there a horrible gluten emergency? Did you admit someone to membership who was only 98 percent good?

“The police were still raiding the bars back then,” Duddy noted. According to her, members went by first names or adopted aliases to avoid having to rat out fellow Dignitarians to the BPD. “They would publish names in the papers, and there were no employment protections back then. You could get fired.”

Because of this fear, going to Dignity in those days was like entering a gay bar for the first time. Or like showing up at Saint Anthony Shrine that first day for lector training. Nearly every aged Dignitarian told me some version of the following story about his or her first Dignity meeting:

I was twenty-one years old and living with my mother. I found a parking space on the street where I could see the entrance [of Saint Clement’s]. Then someone pulled out of a space, so I parked even closer, right in front of the door. I watched people go in. About a minute before it started, I finally forced myself to go through the door. The main sanctuary was completely dark. Where did all the people go? The only light came from a winding stone staircase that led down in the basement. All of a sudden, a man grabbed me by the elbow. He asked, Are you looking for the Dignity Mass? It’s downstairs. He propelled me down to the basement. All I could hear was laughter. I thought:
That’s not what people do before Mass!
I panicked. I thought,
No one is going to find me. Maybe they’ll find my can
…

In fact, what they typically found was a community even more tightly knit and friendly than the hug-fest I attended thirty-five years later. The priests dressed in street clothes and only put on a stole for the consecration. The kiss of peace was the standard greeting. The post-liturgy social hour routinely resulted in thirty or more Dignitarians heading off to dine together at local restaurants.

Even bomb threats couldn’t scatter them. After a 1982
Boston-Globe
article about Dignity, the sound of boots in the hallway interrupted a Dignity liturgy. Right before the homily, Dignity’s president stood up and said, “I don’t mean to alarm you. The Boston Police are here, but they’re here as our friends. There’s been a bomb threat called in. The [caller said] there’s a bomb timed to go off during the Dignity liturgy and blow up all the faggots. You can leave if you like, but the police are recommending that we stay because the person is probably watching.”

Two mothers got up and left. More than two hundred people stayed put.

According to Duddy, “People were looking at each other, and you could tell they were thinking, Is this real? Are we going to die? Is something awful going to happen?’”

Asked why they did not leave, another Dignitarian explained: “If I was going to die, why not die here? This was my real family. I felt closer to them than to my cousins.”

An arsonist targeted Dignity’s office two years later. These tales made my despair over the closing of the JUC, a lifeless Easter Mass, or a lost vote in the Massachusetts legislature look silly. The closest I had come to open flame was when our rooftop grill flared on a particularly choice T-bone. Behind all the hugs and consolation, Dignity had dignity. These were people I would be proud to count as my own and number in my prayers at bedtime.

I sought out more Dignity elders, gathered at their feet, and begged them to tell me stories about the old days in the archdiocese, when heroes wandered the earth, dragons flew, and we jousted with archbishops for sport. This wasn’t about me, and I was goddamn thankful for it.